General Flex Requirement?

[Deverick]

As others have said, general knowledge of encounters and your class is a very good start. Many group leaders on Oqueue or Openraid will ask for higher ilvl to increase success and lower the chance of failure. Experience is more often than not overlooked as it is very easy to say "10/14h" and to have never stepped foot into LFR. Some check armory profiles and most do not. Anyone who has the capacity to play their role well and understands their class can do Flex in my honest opinion.

[Wildtree]

I think Blizzard should integrate gear scaling into Flex and LFR too..
Why so? Because some requirements made up in some people's minds are ridiculous.

Now I do understand how someone would like to have a rather smooth run and doesn't want to endanger themselves to undergeared pugs. That's absolutely okay..
But demanding an ilevel of 550 for Flex? That's borderline idiotic.. Why so?
Flex drops 540 gear which translates upgraded to an item level of 548 max..
If you ask for 550, you limit yourself right there..... Who with an ilevel of 550 needs anything from Flex at all anymore? No one...
I am aware that you can get to 550 without ever doing Flex. But that requires:
1. the legendary cloak
2. a lot of RNG luck on the Celestials and more importantly Ordos.

I blame Blizzard for that development within the game's community. That never ever existed before to that extend, until some devs at Blizz had the glorious idea to reveal the item level on the gear. Combined with that came the achievements...
Suddenly we've got "blessed" with the stupidest addon the game has ever seen.. GearScore..
It lead to an outright insane obsession with gear score of the people. Now post your gear score and your achievement...
We need a healer for Normal LK... post your heroic progress, post your gearscore that makes LK gear obsolete. Gotta have that..
Outright utter bullshit, debunked years ago by Ensidia, to a point that Blizzard even dedicated an achievement for it..
Ensidia debunked the obsession with gear, by purposely taking on Ulduar, while it was still current content, in all blue dungeon gear, and cleared it..
Proving ultimately how the obsession is bullshit, and how personal skill trumps top level gear any given day.

Now for the realistic numbers for Flex..
Wing 1 is definitely suited for item level 515.. The deeper you get into it, the more your gear becomes a factor. I'd use 5 pts increase per wing to be a decent enough number. If you wanna play it conservative, start with 520 and again apply 5 pts per wing..

[Tziva]

If I was leading a PuG?

I'd probably ask for like ilvl 520 for the first two wings and ilvl 530 for the latter two, and "at least" kills on LFR. If people had flex achievements, I'd probably give leeway on the ilvl for DPS and heals since them knowing the fights already is going to be worth more than a few points of ilvl.


I don't have any qualms with people asking for absurd ilvls for their own PuGs when they are making a group to just steamroll through. Having high ilvl generally means good experience and makes it that much smoother. For people who are going back for meta achievements or because they have a group of people just trying to get that one last missing piece, it makes sense to look for other skilled, experienced people.